Tag: science and society

Infinite sponsorship

I’ve just been reading the novel Infinite Jest, and immediately struck by the originality of Wallace’s conception of corporate sponsorship. Universities such as my own have been willing to paste sponsors’ names on buildings, institutes, libraries, posts, scholarships, quadrangles, and pretty much anything else that is identifiable on a map or organisational chart, but they have left the temporal dimension barely touched. Whereas in Wallace’s novel the naming rights to years are sold off, so that a date might be referred to as 1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, we still name our terms for medieval feast days: Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity terms. Imagine if, instead, we had Nuffield Term, Sainsbury Term, and (Your-Name-Here) Term.

Of course, that is not the limit. (Of course!) There are periodic arguments in my subject over abandoning the dowdy name of “Statistics”. “Information science” and “Data science”are two alternatives that have been proposed. But if we are going to change our name, why not get paid for it? We could become the Department of GlaxoSmithKline. Across the way the Computing Laboratory would become the Department of Google. And what we now know as the Department of Mathematics would be more recognisable to prospective students as the Department of Goldman Sachs. They’re not fooling anyone.

Chinese towels

Another thought about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: Her billion-dollar medical-testing company based on secret and unproven technology in her twenties depended largely on a board of well-connected politicians and former politicians, notable for their lack of any relevant scientific expertise. But before she got to that point she needed to turn the heads of some scientists. According to the New Yorker, she caught the attention of dean of engineering Channing Robertson in her freshman year at Stanford:

One day, in her freshman year, Robertson said, she came to his office to ask if she could work in his lab with the Ph.D. students. He hesitated, but she persisted and he gave in. At the end of the spring term, she told him that she planned to spend the summer working at the Genome Institute, in Singapore. He warned her that prospective students had to speak Mandarin.

 “I’m fluent in Mandarin,” she said.

“I’m thinking, What’s next? She’s already coming into the research group meetings at the end of her freshman year with my Ph.D. students. I find myself listening to her more than to them about the next experiments to be done and the progress that’s been made. I realized she’s different.”

Clearly scientific acumen was exceptional. But what is the role of Mandarin? (This is the second story in the article about how she impressed people with her knowledge of the language.) I am reminded of the famous passage in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value… More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have ”lost”.

Is speaking Mandarin (assuming you’re not yourself Chinese) the intellectual equivalent of having your towel? Is that what he means by “What’s next?” He’s thinking, I’m dean of the engineering school at Stanford, and I don’t speak Mandarin. She’s only 18 and she’s managed to learn to speak fluent Mandarin. She must know all kinds of things that I have no inkling of.

Is that the reason why the chic private schools in the UK all seem to be teaching Mandarin?

The right to be honoured

The journalist Barbara Ellen, writing in the Guardian, has defended Cambridge historian David Starkey, who has come under attack for his racist remarks:

An open letter to the university, signed by hundreds of staff, students and alumni, accuses Starkey of repeatedly making racist statements. It cites his appearance on BBC Newsnight after the summer riots of 2011 in which he said: “A substantial amount of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.”

It also cited a more recent interview in the Telegraph in which Starkey said statistics “appeared” to show a black propensity to violence.

A twofer: He insulted all black people, and simultaneously applied an insulting term for the white working class. Ellen protests

Free speech is one of the most precious facets of British society, but here is proof that, for some, it is all too dispensable. The pre-emptive ban is replacing the enriching debate. Nuance and difference are being hounded into the shadows.

How long before society reaches a state of self-monitoring, self-censoring “offence-Stasi”, with everyone on permanent red alert?

That sounds terrible. Starkey was “pre-emptively banned” merely for making perfectly ordinary disparaging remarks about black people. What was he banned from? Appearing as the leading spokesman for one of the world’s most esteemed universities in a promotional fund-raising video. That’s exactly the sort of thing that used to go on in communist police states. Continue reading “The right to be honoured”

The Shabbat automobile (and other regulatory subterfuges)

It reminds me of the questions that folklorist Alan Dundes raised in his book The Shabbat Elevator and other Sabbath Subterfuges: Why do Orthodox Jews adopt enormously rigid strictures on every element of their lives, and then devote enormous energy and creativity to evading them, as when they tie a string around a whole neighbourhood to make an eruv, defined to be a single residence for purposes of the law that bans carrying objects in a public domain.

One could well ask, if a set of customs is deemed overly oppressive, why not simply repeal or ignore them?

At least they can argue that repeal isn’t really an option when you’re talking about divine law. But what about automobile pollution regulations?

Amid all the attention focused on Volkswagen’s bizarre cheating on diesel emissions tests — which ought to, but probably won’t, lead to multiple executives spending long terms in prison — some interesting lessons about the general nature of regulations and testing threaten to be submerged. As many have pointed out, real diesel emissions are many times higher than those permitted by regulations. The tests are routinely evaded, if not always as creatively as Volkswagen has done. Some examples: Continue reading “The Shabbat automobile (and other regulatory subterfuges)”

More uncertainty confusion

After commenting on the confusion between different clichés about physics and physicists in reporting about Angela Merkel, I feel obliged to note this sentence, from an article in the New Statesman about the fake traveller-tourist dichotomy:

The rush to witness the “authentic” ultimately alters the reality, in a kind of behaviourist butterfly effect.

Once again, physics clichés are being confounded. When you’re looking for an educated-sounding way to make the banal observation that it’s hard to observe things without getting mixed up in them, and so changing them, the cliché you want is “uncertainty”. The “butterfly effect” is what you cite when you’re bloviating about how small actions can have large long-term effects.

It’s slightly depressing for anyone who has hopes for general science education. It suggests that even if you come up with compelling ordinary-language metaphors for scientific concepts, the result will just be a salad of interchangeable expressions gesturing vaguely at an undifferentiated mass of physics woo-woo concepts.

Quantum politics

According to The Guardian,

It is, perhaps, a measure of just how powerful she has become: Angela Merkelnow appears to be influencing youth slang. The compilers of Germany’s most popular dictionary say that the verb “merkeln” is on track to become the most popular “youth word” of the year… The word is none-too flattering, meaning being indecisive, or failing to have an opinion on something – behaviour that Germans often attribute to Merkel.

They attribute this characteristic to quantum physics:

Merkel observers put the chancellor’s approach down to her training in quantum physics, which leads her to work a problem through step by step like an experiment, rather than trying to predict its outcome in advance.

What’s weird is, first of all, that she’s not particularly an expert on quantum physics. Her doctorate is in physical chemistry, and while it did involve quantum mechanics, it also involved many other tools and methods equally well. Second, the characteristics they describe have nothing to do with quantum physics. They’re simply attributes of an experimental scientist (though I would have thought that scientists are more typically accused of being dogmatic and inflexible, more than of being indecisive).

Surely, if you’re attributing someone’s indecision to their training in quantum physics you have to make some reference to “uncertainty” or “quantum superposition”. Merkel is Schrödinger’s Kanzlerin.

Just joking

Following up some references related to Thomas Malthus recently, I discovered that Carlyle’s notorious appellation “dismal science” for economics (or “political economy”) was not a reference to the pessimistic world view of Malthus and his descendants. This sobriquet first appeared in an essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, in which he criticised the emancipation of Black slaves in the West Indies, leaving the unfortunate Blacks to wallow in disgraceful idleness. Carlyle attacked political economy for undermining natural hierarchies, for

declaring that Negro and White are unrelated, loose from one another, on a footing of perfect equality, and subject to no law but that of supply and demand according to the Dismal Science.

Here “dismal” is presumably not being used in the modern sense of “gloomy”, but in the older sense of “threatening” or “inauspicious”, as in Henry VI pt. 3:

Bring forth that fatal screech-owl to our house,
That nothing sung but death to us and ours:
Now death shall stop his dismal threatening sound,
And his ill-boding tongue no more shall speak.

Carlyle lumps the Dismal Science together with other unfortunate modern political innovations, such as “ballot boxes”, “universal suffrages” and “Exeter-Hall Philanthropy”.

Here I’d like to call attention to Carlyle’s framing device. The essay is attributed to a fictitious author with the absurd name Dr. Phelin M’Quirk. It begins

THE following occasional discourse, delivered by we know not whom, and of date seemingly above a year back, may, perhaps, be welcome to here and there a speculative reader. It comes to us — no speaker named, no time or place assigned, no commentary of any sort given in the hand-writing of the so-called “Doctor,” properly “Absconded Reporter,” Dr. Phelin M’Quirk, whose singular powers of reporting, and also whose debts, extravagances, and sorrowful insidious finance-operations, now winded up by a sudden disappearance, to the grief of many poor trades-people, are making too much noise in the police offices at present! Of M’Quirk’s composition, we by no means suppose it to be; but from M’Quirk, as the last traceable source, it comes to us; offered, in fact, by his respectable, unfortunate landlady, desirous to make up part of her losses in this way.

Together with some self-mocking references to some offended members of the fictional audience leaving in a huff, this sets up the cover story, particularly beloved of British racists and misogynists, that “I’m just joking”. You insult people with a wink, simultaneously spreading poisonous sentiments and confirming your superior power by forcing them to smile while you insult them — if they don’t, they are dismissed as “humourless”. Most recently there was Tim Hunt, whose defenders say that his disgraceful remarks on women in science were some kind of protected speech because he followed them with “Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it.” “Now seriously” is the proof that he was just joking, so critics are joyless harridans.
Continue reading “Just joking”

Too many orang-utans?

I recently read Pierre Boulle’s Planète des Singes [Planet of the Apes]. I knew about the novel, of course, but hadn’t read it. It is very much of its time and place — though, as I have commented, the origins of the story have been sufficiently obscured by the various film versions, as to make a French version seem to an American cartoonist a plausible punchline. What I had not anticipated was the extent to which the novel is a satire about scientists, the management of science, and science education. The point is well summarised mid-way through the story, when we are finally given an overview — from the chimpanzee perspective — of the social structure of the planet Soror. I say social structure, but the only apes who are of any interest are scientists of some sort or other, and the only social or political organisation we hear about is scientific, though we do hear about a more brutal past, where the gorillas ruled by force. They have maintained the habit of power.

Ils excellent dans l’art de tracer des directives générales et de manoeuvrer les autres singes. Quand un technicien a fait une découverte interéssante, tube lumineux par exemple ou combustible nouveau, c’est presque toujours un gorille qui se charge de l’exploiter et d’en tirer tout le bénéfice possible. Sans être véritablement intelligents, ils sont beaucoup plus malins que les orang-outans. Ils obtiennent tout ce qu’ils veulent de ceux-ci en jouant de leur orgueil. Ainsi, à la tête de notre Institut… il y a un gorille administrateur, que l’on voit très rarement…
[They excel in composing general instructions and in manipulating other apes. When a technician has made an interesting discovery, for example a luminiferous tube, or a new fuel, it is almost always a gorilla who takes charge of the development and extracting the maximum possible benefit. Without being genuinely intelligent, they are much more clever than the orang-utans. The gorillas get everything they want from them by playing on their pride. Thus, our Institute is headed by a gorilla administrator, who is almost never seen.]

The gorillas also produce, when they do occasionally stoop to research, massive tomes that are expertly structured and organised, even if the content is produced by others, each one by a different subaltern chimpanzee.

The orang-utans are referred to as the “official science”, although

certains se poussent parfois dans la politique, les arts et la littérature. Ils apportent les mêmes caractères dans toutes ces activités. Pompeux, solennels, pédants, dépourvus d’originalité et de sens critique, acharnés à maintenir la tradition, aveugles et sourds à toute nouveauté, adorant les clichés et les formules toutes faites, ils forment le substratum de toutes les academies. Doués d’une grande mémoire, ils apprennent énormément de matières par coeur, dans les livres. Ensuite, ils écrivent eux-mêmes d’autres livres, ou ils répètent ce qu’ils ont lu, ce qui leur attire de la considération de la part de leurs frères orang-outans…. Le malheur c’est qu’ils fabriquent ainsi tous les livres d’enseignement, propageant des erreurs grossières dans la jeunesse simienne.
[some of them do occasionally make their way into politics, art, and literature. They display the same characteristics in all their activities. Pompous, solemn, pedantic, lacking in originality and critical sense, obsessed with preserving traditions, blind and deaf to all novelty, adoring clichés and settled formulas, they form a substratum in all the academies. Gifted with excellent memories, they learn enormous amounts of material by heart from books. Then they write it all down in other books, repeating exactly what they read, thus attracting the approbation of their brother orang-utans… The real tragedy is that they write, in this way, all the textbooks, perpetuating gross errors among the simian youth.]

As for the chimpanzees,

Ceux-ci semblent bien représenter l’élément intellectuel de la planète. Ce n’est pas par forfanterie si Zira soutient que toutes les grandes découvertes ont été faites par eux. C’est tout au plus une généralisation un peu poussée, car il y a quelques exceptions. En tout cas, ils écrivent la plupart des livres intéressants, dans les domaines les plus divers. Ils paraissent animés par un puissant esprit de recherche.
[They appear to be the intellectual element of the planet. It is not mere boastfulness when Zira claims that all the great discoveries have been made by chimpanzees. To be sure, it is a bit exaggerated, as there are some exceptions. In any case, they write most of the interesting books on all subjects. They appear to be motivated by a powerful spirit of research.]

There must be important lessons for us here, in the age of the REF. Also for teaching. The government wants us to produce more gorillas, but our education system is optimised for orang-utans. As for the chimpanzees, they’ve recognised that they’ll muddle through anyway, or enough of them anyway, motivated by this “powerful spirit of research”, willing to work for a few bananas on fixed-term contracts.

Technical literature

I just read Charles Yu’s review of Neal Stephenson’s new novel Seveneves (after reading the novel itself), a story that begins with the moon being suddenly disintegrated by a mysterious force, and goes downhill from there. Yu  writes

The skill with which this is all carried out is also a liability. Stephenson is so fluid a writer, so adept at the particular thing he does, that he can get away with very long stretches of what’s frequently referred to as “infodumps” but what I prefer to call “techsposition”: an amalgam of technical geekery and plotty exposition, fused into one substance, a material Stephenson has seemingly perfected… The amount of context required to understand any given passage, its lingo and conceptual background prerequisites, is astounding — resulting, at times, in sentences like this:

“A new niksht had been formed, just at the place where the whip was attached to the hebel, and was beginning to accelerate ‘forward,’ accelerating the flivver to the velocity it would need to accomplish the rest of the mission.”

… The challenge of writing a novel in which some of the most important entities are rocks is that some of the most important entities are rocks.

This doesn’t look very good. But you might make similar comments about other, more generally esteemed, novels. For instance,

The amount of context required to understand any given passage, its lingo and conceptual background prerequisites, is astounding — resulting, at times, in passages like this:

“The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.”

The challenge of writing a novel in which some of the most important entities are whales is that some of the most important entities are whales.

That is, indeed, how many 19th century readers appraised Moby Dick. With greater familiarity, critics came to understand that technical detail is essential to a story of human struggle with nature. Nature doesn’t care about our passions and ambitions, or any of our self-aggrandisement, except as these are manifested physically. So it is with Seveneves, whose characters strut upon a vast stage of human striving, conflict and desire, but their lofty thoughts and speeches can seem ridiculous when put up against the hard facts of orbital mechanics and inertia that brook no persuasion. The very weight of detail communicates the ponderous physical law that the characters need to contend with, a heroic age where Odysseus needs to retire to his tent to spend days calculating,

Natural phenomena

Boris Johnson doesn’t like the fact that biologist Tim Hunt has been fired for pointing out the peculiar “natural phenomenon” that he happens to have stumbled upon in his brilliantly insightful way, that “girls in the lab” (his jocular, brilliant designation for what are sometimes referred to in other contexts as “women scientists”, or, more loosely, just as “scientists”) “cry when you criticise them”.

Sir Tim was a “distinguished” scientist who did not deserve to be “pilloried” for pointing out “a natural phenomenon”, he said.

I wonder if “pilloried” is the right word here. There were simply a lot of people pointing out the “natural phenomenon” that elderly male scientists have a tendency to run their mouths on topics they have little understanding of, particularly when they have won a big prize. I’m sorry if anyone was offended by that.

It reminds me of the Larry Summers affair. Like Hunt, Summers was used to being treated like a genius, and so he could pull out any scientific-sounding chestnut, and expect it to be treated like a scintillating original aperçu. Why do feminists hate standard deviations? (Summers downfall also was pushed by his habit of treating other scholars like lazy schoolchildren, who couldn’t possibly understand their own subject as well as the Great Economist. I’m sure he wouldn’t care that his abuse of statistical terminology offends statisticians.)

And like Hunt, Summers found supporters who thought his trite and ill-considered comments were uncomfortable nuggets of wisdom. It’s the oldest logical fallacy: The truth hurts, they reason, so if it hurts it must be true. At least, if it hurts other people.